Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry

Entries tagged with recs

Homestuck has officially eaten my brain, and unlike with poor neglected JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, this time there's a freaking massive fandom available to fuel my new obsession.

While surfing for fanart and fanfic porn, let's not kid ourselves, it's almost all porn up in my "Fic" bookmarks folder, but anyway I was struck by how ship-happy this fandom is. They seem enthusiastically dedicated to shipping Everyone/Everyone, to the point where I wondered if there are even any shipwars in this fandom. I knew that some ships were controversial (John/Vriska, Kanaya/any male character, the incest ships, etc), but I'd yet to see evidence of any traditional ship-vs-ship death-matches.

TV Tropes confirmed what I suspected: Homestuck fandom is similar to Naruto fandom in that the sheer volume of characters and viable pairings ensure that any given shipwar will have difficulty building up size, influence, and venomosity simply because the majority of the fandom have their balls in completely unrelated courts. When only a fourth or a fifth of the fans give any degree of crap about your shipwar, it's not going to make much of an impact. Compare this to a fandom like Avatar, which was utterly dominated by a single shipwar through the show's entire three-season run; it was rare to find someone who hadn't picked a side, and the two factions had such drastically different interpretations of the main characters' personalities, the core themes of the show, and even basic plot elements that it made it nigh impossible for the two groups to have a civil conversation, even if said conversation was about something totally unrelated to shipping!

However even big sprawling canons still produce a few bitter shipping rivalries, even if they're small and contained, and according to TV Tropes, the one in Homestuck fandom that refuses to die down is Dave/Terezi vs. Karkat/Terezi. Which is completely hilarious to me because one of the first Homestuck fics I ever read was this glorious gem of a chatlog fic in which Terezi, Dave, and Karkat discuss their mutual desire to boink each other and try to decide what type of relationship each side of the triad should be having, and eventually they conclude that a threesome is the best solution. And bing, suddenly I have a new OT3. As a result, I cannot begin to take the D/T vs. K/T debate seriously. It's like debating whether to have a cookie or a glass of milk. Besides, why should Terezi have to choose just one guy? Terezi is awesome! She gets all the guys! All of them!

After reading through the whole thing, I feel like these guys have kind of misunderstood what a dating profile is supposed to accomplish, so let's clear a few things up:

1) Ok Cupid is a dating site. It is not your therapist.2) Whining about how much of a pathetic loser you are is not a turn-on.3) Whining about how you know tons of women but none of them has ever wanted to date you is also not a turn-on. In fact it tends to make one suspicious that maybe there's a very good reason none of them wanted to date you.4) Ranting about how horrible and stupid women are is definitely not a turn-on. You are trying to attract women, not drive them away.

However, I am glad that these Nice Guys are so lacking in self-awareness that they persist in writing such embarrassingly revealing profiles. Makes them easier to avoid.

Thing 1: There's yet another creepy privacy-violating internet-censorship law afoot in Congress called CISPA. You can read about it here and you can send a protesting form letter to your Congressperson here.